From Plato to Plowden
It is sometimes suggested that the idea of learning by doing
came like a flash of inspiration, pre-packed and ready-made out
of its box, some time in the last 250 years.
It is also suggested by some that it is now time to throw away the box and everything that
was ever inside it. But Pigeon Post is designed on the basis that the idea of learning by
doing is a good one. It has a long and ancient history.
In ancient Greece, 2,400 years ago, Socrates taught the art of debate. One of the devices he taught later came to be known by the Latin
'reductio ad absurdum' (reduction to the absurd). If a step in an argument leads to a contradiction, it must be false. In a
self-confident, but brutally critical, society, a debater who got reduced to the absurd could and should be duly taken down a peg. But at the
time of Socrates, the power of Athens was on the wane. After a final military defeat,
not one for which Socrates himself could reasonably be blamed,
he was put on trial for his life. He was allowed to defend himself, but he did not
succeed in his defence. After a final meal with friends and a bath so that his body would not need
need to be washed after his death, he was given a drink made from the pretty but poisonous plant, hemlock.
As tradition required with this supposedly 'humane' form of execution, Socrates drank the cup himself.
Just before he died, he joked,
"We owe a cockerel to the God of medicine. Don't forget to pay."
Plato, the student of Socrates, and Aristotle, the student of Plato, pursued the ideal of doing
what one thinks is right against opposition. Truth would eventually emerge.
Aristotle wrote, "Anything that we have
to learn to do, we learn by the actual doing of it... We become just by doing just acts,
temperate by doing temperate ones, brave by doing brave ones." As Socrates had shown, and Aristotle
came all too close to showing, this was an idea to die for.
These insights were almost lost from view until the renaissance.
In The Scholemaster, Roger Ascham, (1515-1568), the teacher of Queen Elizabeth, wrote,
"It is pitie, that commonlie, more care is had, yea and that emonges verie wise men,
to finde out rather a cunnynge man for their horse, than a cunnyng man for their children.
To the one they will gladlie giue a stipend of 200 crounes by yeare, and loth to offer to the
other 200 shillinges. God suffereth them, to haue, tame, and well ordered horse, but wilde
and vnfortunate children."
Ascham was not the last teacher to complain that education was not being given the respect that it deserved. And he tells of a
"lewde and spitefull prouerbe that the greatest clerkes be not the wisest men."
Mindful of the fate of Socrates, Ascham was clearly aware that his point might be seen as
subversive. Attitudes
to discipline in education copuld be a coded reference to politics.
He makes his point in a suitably subtle way. He tells the story
of a dinner party with the Queen and members of the Privy Council during the "great plage"
of 1563. William Cecil, the Principal Secretary, brought news which evidently
struck those present as more important than the plague. "Diuerse Scholers of Eaton
be runne awaie from the Schole for feare of beating." Cecil went on to suggest that the
masters seemed out to punish "rather, the weakenes of nature, than the fault of the
Scholer." This led to an argument. Against Cecil, it was said that that "the Rodde onelie
was the sworde that must keepe the Schole in obedience." But even in this innermost and
informal, private sanctum of the Elizabethan court, most of those present thought it best to remain silent.
Ascham stresses that he himself was on Cecil's side. He writes, "the
Scholehouse should be in deede, as it is called by name, the house of playe and pleasure,
and not of feare and bondage."
After dinner, Richard Sackville, one of those who had remained silent, took Ascham on one side to say, evidently in
confidence, "I would not for good deale of monie haue bene, this daie, absent from diner.
Where, though I said nothing, yet I gaue as good eare, and do consider as well the taulke
that passed, as any one did there." Sackville confessed that he had had the "ill chance
to light upon so lewde a Scholemaster." And he offered to pay for the education of his own
son and Ascham's, if Ascham could find a teacher. Sackvillle kept his side of the bargain,
and financed Ascham's school.
But such thoughts could not be safely voiced out loud. Ascham left
the responsibility of publication to his widow. She only published the book two years after his death.
His love of teaching is easy to hear. "There is no such whetstone, to sharpen a good witte
and encourage a will to learninge, as is praise if the childe misse, either in forgetting
a worde, or in chaunging a good with a worse, or misordering the sentence. I would not haue
the master, either froune, or chide with him, if the childe haue done his diligence."
He describes a "liuely and perfite waie of teaching of Rewles" by translating from Latin
into English and an hour or more later translating from the translation back into Latin.
The technique is still in use.
"Bring not up your children in learning by compulsion and feare", he says, "but by playing
and pleasure."
He is picking up the thread of humanism from the diplomatic Desiderius Erasmus,
the paradoxical Thomas More, and the sanctimonious Juan Luis Vives, both of the last two
falling foul of Henry Vlll, More losing his head, Vives just his home and his job.
Ascham's thinking is taken several steps further in two books in 1581 and 1582 by another teacher,
Richard Mulcaster. Education should be in English, on what is now known as an educational 'foundation',
and not be just for children from the inner circle around the crown.
Starting to sound much more like a modern writer than Ascham ever did, Mulcaster suggests, "The end of education... is to help natur
unto hir perfection."
A generation later, in 1605 Francis Bacon, the intellectual father of modern science,
argued for the importance of natural curiosity and for the direct observation of nature.
Bacon left various hints that he was the author
of rather more than he admitted. As Gallileo found, the announcement of new discoveries could be dangerous.
In The Great Didactic of 1632, another teacher, the Czech Johan Amos Comenius, looked for a way in which schools
might "cease to persuade and begin to demonstrate; cease to dispute and begin to look;
cease to believe and begin to know." He wrote, "Nothing should
be taught to the young, unless it is not only permitted, but actually demanded by
their age and mental strength." In 1640, Comenius was invited to England by the House
of Commons. The plan was to start a 'Universal College' for boys and girls in which teachers
could be trained with 'Universal Books' on all subjects in a 'Universal Language', rather than Latin.
With the outbreak of the Civil War, the plan came to nothing. But some comments
by William Petty, a doctor in Cromwell's army in 1647, give a flavour of the new thinking.
"We see Children do delight in Drums, Pipes, Fiddles, Guns made of Elder sticks, and
bellowes noses, piped Keys, etc., painting Flags and Ensigns with Elder-berries and
Corn poppy, making ships with Paper, and setting even Nut-shells a swimming, handling
the tooles of workmen as soon as they turne their backs, and trying to worke themselves."
This seems to be one of the first descriptions of children playing, a topic previously not thought worthy of description.
A century later, the largely self-taught Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712-1778) saw education as a
natural extension of child development. The less education
interfered with natural development the better. Despite his evident lack of experience of either
children or the real world of education, Rousseau's work remained the inspiration of
many, including the first educationist of the modern era, Johann Pestalozzi.
Pestalozzi pulls together all the threads in the work of Socrates,
Plato, Aristotle, Vives, Erasmus, More, Ascham, Mulcaster, Bacon, Comenius and Rousseau, and puts them into
practice.
The last major expression of this thinking in the English-speaking world was
Lady Bridget Plowden's 1967 report on primary education in Britain.